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TechEngage » Security & Privacy

A Tiny Spy Chip made a Huge Hack!

News

Avatar for Areen Zahra Areen Zahra Follow Areen Zahra on X Published: Oct 5, 2018 · 6:00 AM ET

Chinese spy chips
After repeated Security breaches in past week, the cyber world doesn't seem to be a safe place at all.
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After repeated Security breaches in past week, the cyber world doesn’t seem to be a safe place at all. This time it’s the US supply chain Data that has allegedly been spied by China.
News has it that Super Micro motherboards assembled in China had a small spy chip that infiltrated US Supply chain data.
This dispute was popped back in 2015 and till now has been a subject of investigation with the U.S. government investigation. Later on, Thursday Bloomberg claimed that Apple’s and Amazon’s supply chain data had been spied by China’s spy chips. The spy chips not bigger than a grain’s size were found nested on the motherboard. The report confirmed that these chips were incorporated by the manufacturing firms. These chips bypassed all security checks to provide a safe path for Chinese to peek into major networking of reputed US firms. The news report further affirms that China was planning to have a long-term access to the corporate secrets as well as government networks. As soon as the news broke out, all three parties came up with their stance. Apple denying all the allegation made by Bloomberg said:
“We are deeply disappointed that in their dealings with us, Bloomberg’s reporters have not been open to the possibility that they or their sources might be wrong or misinformed. Our best guess is that they are confusing their story with a previously reported 2016 incident in which we discovered an infected driver on a single Super Micro server in one of our labs. That one-time event was determined to be accidental and not a targeted attack against Apple.”
Amazon too strongly denied the news and said:
“As we shared with Bloomberg Business-week multiple times over the last couple months, at no time, past or present, have we ever found any issues relating to modified hardware or malicious chips in Super Micro motherboards in any Elemental or Amazon systems.‎”
The entire scenario became complicated as the two companies refused to accept the allegations. They claimed that Bloomberg had been confused with a previously reported incident from 2016. China’s Foreign Ministry responded to the situation aggressively saying that China had always been an absolute defender of cyber-security. The news has caused a huge spur in the business world. Many Chinese companies are facing a severe tumble in their shares. Lenovo’s share had a fall of 23 percent today during the morning trade. Whereas Super Micro’s ‘shared’ saw a quick drop of 40% as soon as the Bloomberg’s Business Week Report came out. Apple’s shares had a decline of 1 %, whereas Amazon faced a drop of 1.5% in their shares. The report is creating a storm between two superpowers. Any plans of moving to Mars?

Related reading

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  • State-Sponsored Cyber Warfare Units and the Global Threat Landscape
  • Is the NIH trying to discourage collaboration between U.S. and Chinese researchers?
  • Russia to briefly "turn off" country's Internet access. But why?
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Filed Under: Security & Privacy, Tech News & Analysis Tagged With: Apple, China, News

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Avatar for Areen Zahra

Areen Zahra

Auto & AI Reporter

Areen Zahra is an Auto and AI Reporter at TechEngage who writes about automotive technology, artificial intelligence, apps, and social media. An IT professional by training, she covers how software and machine intelligence are reshaping transportation and daily life across more than 130 articles.

Joined TechEngage September 2018First article on TechEngage September 2018

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